Teaching the One Percent

I regularly teach the required first-year humanities course at Columbia University, where I encounter a random cross section of the incoming class. “Literature Humanities” is a centerpiece of our Core Curriculum: over the course of the year, the twenty or so students and I carefully read authors like Homer and Augustine, Dante and Virginia Woolf in order to grapple with the visions of human life and its characteristic problems found in their writings.

Roughly three years later, my students, along with those in the seventy or so other sections of the course who read the same texts, have typically finished their study. According to the exuberant findings of our undergraduate career center, of those who go straight into the workforce, roughly a quarter will enter investment banking, investment management, or another financial services field; another ten percent will enter management consulting. I know these statistics when I walk into the room on the first day of Literature Humanities. And I know that my section of the class is like every other in this respect, and that nothing I say or do is particularly likely to change these outcomes.

In short (to an extent still remarkable to me) I teach future members of the “one percent.”

Modern universities, particularly elite universities like Columbia, are strange places, caught between worlds. The permanent residents (the faculty) largely lead contemplative intellectual lives at one remove from the whole sphere of public action. The visitors (the students) – who pay to keep the place going – are largely preparing themselves for active lives of work. Of course, this same division was present in the ancient universities of Europe from which ours descend, where students were prepared for careers in the professions, not least in the church, but also in law and in medicine.

Rutilio Manetti, Dido and Aeneas, oil on canvas, 1630. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

What is really strange now is that the courses of studies that elite universities offer – especially those that still lay claim to the liberal arts ideal – are governed by values that stand at odds with the work many of our students go on to do. This tension tends to make hypocrites of the faculty, who seem to be forced either to laud the worldly value of the education we offer or to concede that the work we ask of our students is devoted to goals they cannot seriously embrace in the long term.

There is, however, another choice we can make in the face of this tension: we can – and, I argue, should – be frank with our students that the education we offer, and the values that guide it, might make a difference to them in the parts of their life that are untouched by the pursuit of material well-being or social esteem, those that lie beyond the imagination of our career center: in their friendships and family life, in their experience of literature and music and art, in their sense of wonder at the order and beauty and complexity of the natural world, and in their confrontation with existential questions that no amount of material well-being or social esteem can fully dissipate.

In other words, we should defend the spiritual worth of a liberal arts education. In making this defense, we might also see why such an education ought to available to anyone who might benefit from it, rather than being a luxury for the elite.

In my experience, you do not need to mount such a defense against our students, as if they come to college eager to learn how to make millions or rise to the top of a status hierarchy. To be sure, virtually all of them are keen to ensure their future comfort, and they know an Ivy League degree is an excellent way to secure it. But they also want something more.

This “more” is frequently unarticulated, and I see it as part of my job, as a teacher of the humanities, to help them more clearly see what that “more” might be. That is not because I am a life coach or a spiritual advisor, but rather because the conceptual repertoire and range of experience with the possibilities of human life that one develops through the careful study of literature and philosophy can – and should – be applied to one’s own life and social context and not only at arm’s length from our prescribed syllabus of texts.

The reason we are forced to confront ourselves as part of humanistic education is that our assumptions about human life and our closely held values shape our capacities for interpreting texts. To really grapple with what Augustine is telling us about worldly success or what Woolf is telling us about artistic vision, we must interrogate what we already think about these topics, however inchoately. We must, moreover, be ready to take these strangers as our companions in inquiry, neither demanding every answer from the text nor treating them as lifeless cultural artifacts, merely part of the fossil record of human endeavor.

It is easier to make the case for this kind of study by demonstration. To speak of it in terms like the ones I have used here inevitably risks being too earnest, promising too much – nothing short of spiritual transformation! – from a traditional course of study that proceeds according to traditional methods: reading and commenting on the texts, participating in seminar-style discussion, writing argumentative essays.

Yet there is an important difference between Literature Humanities and, say, Introduction to Advanced Programming, another famous and popular course at Columbia. I want to acknowledge that a student who takes Advanced Programming will probably learn something about the art of computer science, the higher mysteries of pointers and memory allocation and compilers that make all the computer technology we take for granted work. Here, too, there is the possibility of wonder. But the work of the course, and why so many students take it – even humanities and social sciences majors – is acquiring a set of skills, skills that are increasingly valued in a range of professional settings. Marketable skills, in other words.

Treating yourself as a vessel for such skills, willing to employ them in service of goals given to you by others, is the antithesis of the ancient ideal of liberal education; it is what authors like Aristotle and Seneca would have called “servile education.” Of course, as the very words “servile education” help to indicate, the pursuit of the ideal of liberal education in the ancient world was made possible only by a slave economy and other forms of hierarchy and domination. But doing away with the liberal education ideal altogether in our own time leaves us vulnerable to domination by other social forces, not least the whims of the market.

The question that remains – and which presses on all of us and not only my students as they venture into the world – is how, given that nearly all of us end up subject to those social forces, to hold on to the ideal all the same. Can anything of spiritual worth survive “out there,” outside the cloister of a monastery, arts colony, or university?

People often say that our Core Curriculum classes prepare our students for cocktail parties or networking events with alumni where talking about the Core can be an icebreaker, no matter one’s major. But this only shows how readily the world of material advantage impinges on the spiritual work of liberal education.

If I am to be of any use in preparing my students for cocktail parties, I hope it is instead by helping them to be (that is, to remain) interesting people, which is only possible if you have interests.

The sorts of texts we read in Literature Humanities do help my students – who come from a range of class and educational backgrounds – get a foothold in high culture. For instance, I play them “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas before we discuss Book IV of the Aeneid, partly as a way of demonstrating Vergil’s enduring influence. Last spring, my class took a group trip to The Met Cloisters, a splendid museum of medieval art and culture at the northern tip of Manhattan, where I watched my students confidently interpret the narratives in fifteenth-century altarpieces on the basis of their study of the Gospels of Luke and John.

Yet it isn’t the fact of having these experiences of high culture, but rather the encounter with certain spiritual goods in those experiences that is of lasting value. Caring about fine art does tend to make you fit in better at a certain sort of Manhattan cocktail party (just as caring about sports makes you fit in better at most dive bars), but I have learned from experience that the shibboleths of social status always remain. My hope is simply that Dido and Aeneas is not the last opera my students will encounter nor our visit to the Cloisters the last time they experience medieval European art.

More generally, leaving aside high culture and cocktail parties, what I hope is that they will find their own way toward the beauty of the world, taking an interest in what they value and earnestly want to share it with others. This work is better seen not as a task but as a birthright of human beings, cultural creatures that we are. When one is preoccupied with the trappings of material and social advantage – a pursuit that can never fully be satisfied anyway – it becomes more difficult to look for beauty through one’s own eyes, rather than through the eyes of the arbiters of elegance and power.

We talk too seldom as college educators about a fact that I found central to my own experience as a college student: my teachers were intellectual models for me, not simply vehicles of ideas or even sources of inspiration. The intellectual work they did, both within the classroom and without, showed me possibilities for an intellectual life I came to want for myself.

Yet I do not see my goal in liberal education as turning students into versions of myself. After all, only a few of them are likely to have both the interest and aptitude for graduate study in the humanities, and even those who do go on to graduate study face a grim academic job market.

There is, to be sure, something special about teaching a graduate student to read Aristotle in Greek with scholarly proficiency, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to do this as part of my work, but I am doing something categorically different when I read Homer and Dante in translation in the company of my Literature Humanities students. I am not reading with a scholar’s eye, but with the eye of a humanist who regards these authors as friends and companions in a life devoted to truth. In so doing, I want to impart to all of my students a sense of what a life devoted to the spiritual goods of truth and knowledge might be like, all the while recognizing that my own pursuit of these spiritual goods is rather paltry and that these goods are far less alluring than money, power, and status.

Is this all a fool’s errand, given that I know so many of my students will tread the path in pursuit of worldly success, with its attendant spiritual hollowness? Perhaps the best I can hope for is that even a temporary companionship with these texts and time spent at a formative age with the discomfiting questions they raise can be a seed of discomfort when my students enter “the real world,” a world that demands glibness of speech at networking events, a world that constantly calls their attention to what is easy to appreciate rather than what is challenging and demands study.

I saw this contrast most clearly in a short stint teaching at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as part of Columbia’s Justice-in-Education Initiative, where my students had almost nothing to gain from my class except the satisfaction of their intellectual curiosity and their hunger for acknowledgment as people with ideas and perspectives of their own rather than as bodies to be controlled. In many respects, my students “inside” were very much like my students at Columbia, except that they faced fewer distractions. But they knew clearly that, outside the detention center’s classroom –with its strangely beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline – the spiritual goods they sought, and the liberation thereby offered, would be denied to them. It is an irony that we “outside” can so easily lose sight of what real freedom looks like.